IMPORTANT INFORMATION!
The creator and maintainer of this web site Tony Sanderson died in June 2006. This web site is being maintained in his memory by others.
As a result information on this web site IS NOT CURRENT OR ACCURATE and should not be relied upon at all.

Friday June 15,2001
Has a classic My Word segment about 10 minutes in,
followed by Till death us do part, Round the Horn
and more. If you can't get it to stream reliably, right-click here instead and
select "Save link/target as" to save and play locally.

Monday June 18,2001
Includes excerpts from
Take it from here and Steptoe and Son.
If you can't get it to stream reliably, right-click here instead and
select "Save link/target as" to save and play locally.

Friday June 22,2001
Includes classic excerpts from Dave Allen (body language),
Goons, Monty Python (lumberjack), Just a minute,
Steptoe and son, Armpit Theatre, and more.
And if you can't get it to stream reliably,
right-click
here instead and select "Save link/target as" to save and play locally.
If you want better quality, click
here
for the MP3 version - about 22 Mb.

Tuesday June 26,2001
Includes excerpts from Not the 9 O'clock news, Tony Hancock,
Pete and Dud, I'm sorry, I haven't a clue, To the manor
born and more.
And if you can't get it to stream reliably,
right-click
here instead and select "Save link/target as" to save and play locally.
If you want top quality, click
here
for the MP3 version - about 32 Mb.

Monday July 2,2001
Includes excerpts from
I'm sorry, I'll read that again, Bob Davis, Who's line
is it anyway?, Till death us do part, Round the Horn,
and an overrun into the next program!
If you can't get it to stream reliably, right-click here instead and
select "Save link/target as" to save and play locally.
If you want top quality, click
here
for the MP3 version - about 29 Mb.

The Pepsodent Show (Sunday Night at 8) from 3AW, October 1940. This
programme was networked around Australia from Melbourne's Comedy Theatre,
and compered by Terry Dear. The running time of this excerpt is about
25 minutes.
RealAudio
or
MP3.
(re-encoded 25-Jan-2004)

This is one of a series of acetate broadcast discs uncovered by Chris Long
during a trip up the East coast of Australia a couple of years ago.
It has a great rendition of Melancoly Mood by Dita Robinson about
9 minutes in.
Click on the RealAudio version for a quick preview - or to get a better
idea of the quality, download the 18Mb MP3, which is encoded at 96 Kbit/sec
to get a reasonable response up to 15 KHz.

Old acetates dry out and become brittle, and you can hear plenty of groove
damage on this disc - probably as a result of them having been played with a
low compliance cartridge or worn stylus. Nevertheless, the frequency response
was what surprised me. It does sound as though condenser microphones may
have been in use at 3AW in 1940, at least for live concerts.

If you enjoyed listening to the above sample, here's one more excerpt from
the series. It was the final show of the year - Sunday 10th Novmeber, 1940.
As with the first sample above, this one also has some groove damage on Dita
Robinson's song (someone obviously liked listening to Dita!). Running time of
this excerpt is about 25 minutes.
RealAudio
or
MP3.
(re-encoded 25-Jan-2004)

1975

3AW before "talkback"

By 1975, of course, things had changed a lot.
Radio variety shows, dramas and daily serials had already disappeared, and
3AW was in the process of moving from their well established "something for
everyone" mix of music programmes, news specials, magazine segments and
speciality music shows towards a new, very specialised "format" - that of
talk radio.

The existing generation of well established 3AW personalities from the 1950s
and 1960s - such as Martha Gardiner (the legendary "Martha Gardiner Recommends"
show at 1pm weekdays), David McGee (Chief Announcer), Norman Banks (with
his famous world travel interviews and news comment that he'd originally
established on 3KZ), Arthur Lyster (sport and comedy), Geoff Manion (cool
music and interviews), Ralph Rickman (late night jazz), Tony Doherty (Top
40), and John Bright (breakfast) were now in the
process of being pushed aside to make way for a brash new group of "Shock
Jock" on-air presenters.

This new breed were personified by new and abrasive presenters such as Derry
Hinch and Claudia Wright, and their ascerbic insults to 3AW talk-back callers
with whom they disagreed quickly became legendary.

The new breed lacked formal voice training, had little or no background
training in the radio or entertainment industry, and (more often than not)
sounded quite "nasal", but such changes have nevertheless kept 3AW at the
top of Melbourne's radio ratings throughout the ensuing years. This also
happened in spite of their decision to stay on AM (1278 KHz) when so many
other stations were making the (very expensive) jump to VHF FM in an attempt
to improve their ratings.

The following two excerpts are from December 1975, somewhere in the middle
of this transitional period of 3AW from their general "personality, magazine
and cool/MOR music" format over to their present, almost pure "talkback"
format.

It was also right in the middle of an unprecedented political upheaval in
Australia, whereby we'd just had an elected and reformist Government (headed
by Labor leader Gough Whitlam) sacked by the Australian Governor General,
John Kerr. This happened after the Opposition party (the Liberals, headed by
Malcolm Fraser) had blocked the budget Supply Bill. (Click
here
if you want more background on that particular upheaval.)

The first off-air log below features the one and only Claudia Wright, feminist
extrordinaire, interviewing Bob Hawke (then of the ACTU). One almost feels a
bit sorry for Mr Ian McFee MHR (25-30 minutes in) when listening to this,
but I guess that's politics.

Another excerpt from the same period - this time on the theme of alleged
press bias. The names of some of the political parties mentioned near
the end of this one are interesting. There's even an interview with the
leader of the DLP (the Democratic Labor Party), Frank McManus. (Although,
listening to Frank, it isn't difficult to imagine why the DLP disappeared
soon after.) Again, you can listen via the
streaming RealBubblingAudio version
or you can go for the bigger (15Mb) and better quality
MP3 version
(re-encoded 25-Jan-2004, running time = 31 minutes).

Incidentally, you may notice some slight "volume jitter" and the odd signal
"drop out" in the above off-air logs, mainly due to the particular reel of tape
having suffered many years of hard use prior to this particular recording.
This was just one of the many frustrations we had to tolerate in the bad
old days of analogue recording.

Nevertheless, as Melbourne listeners may notice, the transmitted audio quality
from 3AW was significantly better in 1975 than it is now. The frequency
response was excellent (from around 30Hz to 12KHz), to the point where when
the studio desk is occasionally bumped, you can almost feel it! The
transmitted dynamic range was also very good. Since the 1990s, the transmitted
quality from 3AW has become so poor and the distortion so bad that listener's
telephone calls often sound clearer and smoother than the on-air presenters.

Presumably, this is a by-product of the concomitant trend to "self-regulation"
in combination with poorly skilled technicians as employed at Australian
metro AM stations.

3AW have a web site of sorts -
here,
although it contains very little
history
and no sound archives. Good times
to listen these days are 6pm to midnight on Sundays (Bruce Mansfield and
Philip Brady), and 12 midday until 4pm weekdays (Ernie Sigley) - if you can
put up with the 5 minute back-to-back commercial breaks every 10 minutes
(yet another aspect of commercial radio that's been deregulated in Australia).

Arrrr, what the heck - let's drop in a session or two from back in 1991 when
Geoff Manion dropped back in to 3AW to join Bruce Mansfield in "Remember
when" (when Philip was AWOL for a few weeks). The quality isn't that great
because when I tuned in and heard Geoff's voice, I discovered that my high
quality tuner was dead. So I frantically had to grab the portable GX 300
radio and set up a patch cord for that instead. As a result, the sound is
a bit distorted.

Anyway, listening to this, it's still the ever cool, inimitable Geoff Manion
that most of Melbourne loved and listened to on 3AW for so many years from
1956 into the mid 1970s. In this first session, Ralph
Rickman rang in from Queenland as well ...

This 2nd one also featured Bob Horsefall - plus lots of old ads that we
hadn't heard for years. And an excerpt from a Dad and Dave serial (a
legendary Oz radio serial from the 1930s to the early 1950s). And the
history of organisations such as Lee Gordon who were the first to bring
entertainers such as Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Sammy Davis Jnr out
to Oz. Plus Alan Heferdon (Lee Gordon) and Hec (Hector) Harris ...
Geoff Manion returns to 3AW in 1991 - session 2 of 2
(68 mins, 32Mb, MP3)

And while we're here, on the same tape (GD4 - general dubs #4) I found
another Bruce and Phil session (or several) from 1991 that featured bits of
a radio serial that was well before my time (1940s) but quite fascinating
to hear nonetheless. So sit back, turn out the lights, and listen to ...
Excerpts from a 1940s radio serial - Five Fingers (spy drama)
(30 mins, 14Mb, MP3)

Lyn Nuttall was a keen 3DB listener in those days too - check out his
Poparchives Blog
for more about Barry Ferber, the music of the time, and more!

Stan Rofe, aka Stan the Man, originally on 3KZ in Melbourne in the
late 1950s and 1960s, and then on 3UZ in the 1970s (and on various
FM stations after that) was a true icon on the local rock music radio
DJ scene. This 1970 aircheck was passed on by a person who wishes
to remain anonymous but who's enjoyed some other stuff on these pages
and just felt the urge to contribute something back (and for that,
we're really grateful, R).

Listening to this 1970 one hour excerpt from Stan's Sunday arvo Top 40
countdown on 3UZ and hearing all the ancient music being played, it
suddenly hit me - this was the first time these songs had been aired!
The thought of that suddenly rocked me - people were actually flocking
out to buy these 7 inch singles in their millions. Elvis Presley was
still alive, rating number 8 with "The Wonder Of You" (and touring
Detroit) ... wow!

3UZ was then run by Nilsen's Broadcasting Service (part of Nilsen
Electrical as owned by Oliver J Nilsen) and they had an excellent frequency
for an AM radio station because the efficiency of groundwave propagation
improves as the frequency is lowered - precisely why the Government
placed their ABC stations at the low frequency end of the AM band.
But as a commercial station, 3UZ had the next best thing - they'd
been allocated the lowest frequency commercial licence in Melbourne,
930 KHz. As a result, their powerful long reaching signal provided
excellent daytime reception to all of Victoria (and Tasmania) -
and most of Australia at night.

I've done some equalising on the original, boosting the highs and lows
with a Cooledit FFT filter until it looked fairly flat in its spectral
analyser, and then run it through
level
(a peak-limiter program I've written) with very gentle settings just
to get the level fairly constant. Finally, it's been encoded to MP3
using
Lame 3.96.1
at 48Kbit mono, so the frequency response does brickwall
now at 10KHz. Being an hours worth, it's a large file (21Mb) so
you'll need to be patient downloading it as always (even if you're
lucky enough to get all my limited bandwidth, it will still take you
more than 10 minutes to download).

This is a lesser jump back in time - unfortunately not to 3XY itself, but
close. Some recollections, jingles and hits, presented by an enthusiast ...

The 3XY 10 From Then was a regular segment in The Morning After,
a Saturday afternoon 70s hits program hosted by Ken Francis in the mid 1990s
on
Southern FM (88.3)
here in Melbourne. I was intrigued by Ken's obvious
love of 3XY and the pop industry, and with his own funny, flamboyant on-air
style, and I couldn't resist recording some of his shows. So what you'll
hear via these 2 excerpts is more of a flashback within a flashback ...
recorded in 1995/96, but more a celebration of 3XY and the ABC's
Countdown and so on from back in the 1970s.

Another of the many weird and wonderful personalities on Southern FM at that
stage was a guy calling himself "F W De Clerk" - who has what must be the
most nasally sounding voice you've ever heard on the radio - but his shows
were similarly great to listen to. Again recorded in the mid-90s, "F W"
specialised more in current music (this is a long excerpt - around an
hour's worth):

These days, most of these kinds of guys seem to have been pushed out of
Southern FM - I've
tuned in a few of times recently but the music was all ... well, not sure
what the genre's even called - it's the one where there's a fixed beat off
a synthesiser and there's someone talking rubbish more in less in time to
the beat and it's all happening in the one fixed pitch. Anyway, whatever
it's called, it did nothing for me and I couldn't spin the dial away fast
enough.

Ken Francis has a bit of a
web page
of his own, BTW - courtesy of
Bruce and Phil
(on whose show he apparently helps out these days). I can't find any trace of
Mr "F W De Clerk" though, so I've no idea as to what's happened to him.

Here's a brief selection of 1970's Australian sound (radio) commercials from
the tape archives here. These were recorded at various advertising agency
studios in Melbourne (and Sydney) in the mid-1970's.

By the way, the order is slightly different in the RA and Ogg versions at
the moment:

An old Chappell 78 called
"Melody on the move"
which was recorded in the early 50's (Queens Hall Light Orchestra, UK).
These 10" discs were single sided and pressed on vinyl. They were
specifically recorded for radio program "mood music" and program themes.

The particular copy I've got was thrown out
from 3AW in the late 50's because it was excessively worn, and as was common
practice when replacing such recordings in the library, a yellow oil crayon
was scoured around it to indicate unsuitability for air-play.

Out of interest, I've processed it direct from disc to WAV via an Ortofon
MC10 cartridge into mag pre-amp with the RIAA de-emph disabled, and then
through "Cool Edit" for de-crackling, and finally out to a RealAudio file.
Unfortunately the Ortofon is only fitted with a "microgroove" elliptical
stylus, which means it tends to ride down the bottom of the 78 groove!

Interesting though ... although the (PCM) WAV is 14Mb (16 bit, 44100 b/s mono),
the corresponding RealAudio result squashed down to only 316K - a compression
ratio of around 50:1 (for a 16 Kbit data rate). How the heck do
they manage that? I find it quite amazing.

John is really into classic Spanish flamenco and does a regular spot
on 3ZZZ FM here in Melbourne. He passed on this program in July 2001.
So if you enjoy spanish flamenco, have a listen to this test program.